Verified reporting of the value created by defence contracts
The iX programme is supporting e50K to find innovators who can capture, verify and deduplicate social value delivery across a multi-tier supply chain, so that the value a contract creates can be evidenced rather than asserted.
Opportunity
Challenge opens
05/10/2026
Challenge closes
06/11/2026
Benefit
e50K is looking to use open innovation to record social value delivery once, at the point it happens, and have that record verified, deduplicated across supply chain tiers, and readable by every contract the delivery counts toward. Solution providers from any sector are welcome, and cross sector applicants are actively encouraged. Much of the capability needed here already exists in supply chain traceability in food and pharmaceuticals, in scope 3 carbon accounting and assurance, and in clinical data provenance. What is missing is its application to social value in the defence supply chain. The selected solution will be trialled with e50K on live delivery across the defence estate, with the possibility of wider adoption across the defence supply chain if the trial is successful.
Background
e50K is a social value and bid support business working across the UK defence sector. It advises prime contractors on social value strategy and delivery, and it delivers community, employment and environmental programmes on the defence estate as a subcontractor to prime contractors. Its delivery to date includes 22,446 Move You In Packs provided to armed forces families, an evidenced £24m social return on investment, a 16x multiplier from original investment, and 98.2% of its own supply chain spend placed with SMEs.
The status quo is that social value is committed at bid stage, delivered through supply chains running three or four tiers deep, and reported back in self declared formats that differ by prime contractor, by contract and by year. Evidence is assembled by hand, usually in spreadsheets, often months after the delivery happened. There is no common record, no independent verification of a claim, no way of seeing where the same delivery has been counted by more than one contractor against more than one contract, and no way to record value delivered outside the named scoring criteria.
The motivation is that defence is now committed to showing what its spending creates. The Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 sets out that people across the UK should feel the maximum benefit from increasing defence spending, and commits to a reformed approach to social value. It carries £28.8bn of MOD expenditure with UK industry in 2023/24, an increase in MOD spending with SMEs of £2.5bn by May 2028, £250m of Defence Growth Deals and £182m for skills. Each of those measures what was allocated. None measures what was created.
From 1 January 2027 the Social Value Model reduces to 6 criteria across 2 outcomes. Each criterion carries more weight, the evidential burden on each rises, and value delivered outside them is recorded nowhere. Industry will be scored more heavily on evidence it has no reliable way to produce, and defence will lose sight of a growing share of what its money does.
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